Guide:Distribution

From Game Making Tools Wiki

Sites, tools, article, and any other resources to help you distribute your game.

Physical

  • Cassette cases are a good size to both hold a USB stick and have enough space for artwork.
    • Guide:Compact Cassette - Info on making artwork, buying cases, etc.
    • Tapemarket - Service by Pizza Pranks (Indiepocalype guy) for putting together cases/artwork/USBs cheaply. He can even put them up for sale.
  • There are a million ways to package a CD or DVD.
  • Zines are a great format for sharing physical games, packaging with tapes and CDs, and a million other things.

Digital

Snags

  • Apparently if you're on Windows and trying to ZIP up a .APP folder for Mac users it can get messed up. There's a Python script here to do it properly though: https://gist.github.com/Draknek/3ce889860cea4f59838386a79cc11a85
  • Similarly, Linux (and Mac?) games exported from Windows systems aren't able to run without a little fiddling (open a terminal and chmod +x [game.exe]). But Cheeseness made a little program that Windows users can run to help, called plus-X.

Services

  • Itch.io in kinda like Bandcamp for videogames. It's really easy to put stuff up and get stats on downloads, but you have more control over how your pages look. You have good control over how much and if you want people to pay for things too.
  • Game Jolt is another popular distribution site, where you can upload games to be played online or downloaded.
  • Glorious Trainwrecks is a small, friendly, encouraging community of people dedicated to ignoring principles of good design. They hold regular events: mostly super-short game jam events. It's the best.
  • Internet Archive has built-in emulation for DOS and Windows 3.x games.
  • GOG ???
  • Humble ???
  • Steam charges you $100 to become a 'Steam Developer' — a one-time fee to enable you to put games on Steam Greenlight.

Space

Free

Often have a fee if you want to use your own domain name.

  • Dropbox can be used to host pages, including Unity games. - Ability to serve HTML was about to be disabled :(
  • Neocities provides 1GB of free web hosting. It's pricey if you want to use your own domain though. No WYSIWYG editor. Fun place to surf. Facilitates donations. Add a blog with Zonelets.
  • Nekoweb is similar in ethos to NeoCities, but seems to give you a some more advanced features.
  • HOTGLUE is an easy, WYSIWYG, webpage creation tool. You can either host it yourself, or make an account on hotglue.me. You can pay a fee to use your own domain name.
  • In a similar vein to HOTGLUE is mmm.page, though it's not open-source, and feels a bit more... webdesignery. You can draw straight on your page though, that's neat.
  • Github can also be used to host pages, and domains can be linked for free. Owned my Microsoft.

Not free

Here are a few of the most reasonably-priced + reliable hosts

Open-Source

Useful places for distributing Open-Source projects. You can of course also distribute the code in other ways, such as your own website.

  • Git is a popular way to host, distribute, and contribute to codebases. Github is free and super popular, but there are some self-hosted options too such as Gitlab, Gitblit and Gitea. These are becoming increasingly popular since Microsoft bought took-over Github.

Payment

  • The Humble Widget - Doodad you can stick on your site to handle taking payments.
  • The Itch.io Embeddable Widget - Add links to buy your games through Itch.
  • Neocities lets you link your PayPal account, and has an easy interface for page visitors to send you tips.
  • PayPal and paypal.me (donations have to be done through '.me' I think now?)
  • Crypto wallets?
  • Patreon is the most popular service to collecting donations.
  • Liberapay is a Patreon-like subscription service with better rates (it's funded through donations, not fees) and less shady practices.
  • Kofi is for one-off / non-subscription payments.
  • Retribute is a web-based tool for people to find people to give money to. It works by loading a person's Fediverse account (Funkwhale, Mastodon, Peertube), looks for people you've made connections with, and suggests ways to give them money based on info. in their profile.

Licensing

Other Resources

Things beyond the scope of this wiki.

  • dotoolkit.com - Home of some frameworks for writing presskits, contracts, and aiding distribution; if you're into that kinda thing. By Adriaan de Jongh and Rami Ismail.
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